“OneNote Or It Didn’t Happen”

Putting information where it belongs is a team sport

POIDH is a relatively old acronym, materializing sometime in the early 2000s. It means “Picture Or It Didn’t Happen”, and it is an ask for someone to give you more information, specifically photographic proof of a hard to believe story you just told. The playfulness of POIDH is what I love most about using that phrase. If someone tells you an unbelievable story, and you say, “I don’t believe you,” that could be an insult. But responding with “POIDH” is a kinder way of saying that you need more evidence to believe it.

My longest-standing Microsoft acronym is ONOIDH, a riff off of POIDH. ONOIDH means “OneNote Or It Didn’t Happen.” It is my kinder way of telling someone that the information they just shared will most likely be lost if it’s not captured in a more permanent form. Here’s an example usage in a Teams chat:

• Bob: “Valuable Outlook Keyboard Shortcuts. After helping our new team members ramp up on our tools, I discovered the 5 most useful keyboard shortcuts to help you with the handling of your mail. I wanted to share this with the rest of the team in case it’s news to some of you …”

• Me: “ONOIDH”

Who will Bob’s message help? It will help those who happen to see it and who are able to remember it. Bob’s message is ephemeral, and the onus is on the recipient to make it stick. My ONOIDH response is encouraging Bob to find a better place to capture this useful information … inside the Team’s External Brain¹. As a OneNote guru², I had pushed for OneNote to be a large part of our Organization’s External Brain. Having a shared OneNote notebook that is editable by everyone in the organization empowered everyone to “contribute a verse.”

You Team’s External Brain¹ is a living organism. It is forever pulling in more information, in the quest to shift from tribal knowledge to recorded knowledge. “ONOIDH” is my “oft-uttered phrase” that pushed the team to move collectively from implicit to explicit. Write it down. Leave a paper trail. ONOIDH is all about raising awareness³ that it’s up to all of us to contribute to our team’s knowledge base.